Case study · Lebara
How Lebara grew online sales with customer referrals.
Lebara is a leading European mobile telecoms operator, providing low-cost pay-as-you-go SIM cards, SIM-only plans and handsets to value-conscious customers across five European countries. Historically its customers bought and topped up offline, so growing online sales meant building an acquisition channel out of the word-of-mouth its customers were already generating.
The opportunity
Happy customers willing to recommend, and no channel to do it in.
With rising competition and a high degree of user volatility, telecom operators struggle to acquire and retain customers. The UK market alone carries more than 50 mobile virtual network operators. Lebara, though, had many happy customers who were willing to recommend the brand to family and friends for the right proposition.
Lebara's best-performing channel had always been in-store, and it recognised that growing overall sales meant investing in online. It had tried gaining referrals with voucher incentives, but that did not bring the results it was hoping for: it needed the flexibility to fulfil rewards in cash and to optimize according to its own customers' expectations.
The program
A native referral solution, built into Lebara's own online environment.
Aklamio built a fully branded referral portal that made it easy for users to share a personalized link with their friends, and runs the program around it.
The impact
Referral became a key growth driver for Lebara's online channels.
The program grew from almost nothing into a significant part of the acquisition mix, and customers acquired through it now have the lowest churn rate of any of Lebara's online acquisition channels.
Conversions
increase in referral conversions within 9 months of launch
Visit to conversion
well above the 6 to 8% industry average
Repeat referrers
of successful referrers generate two or more new customer sales
Campaign uplift
sales uplift from a campaign with higher rewards
The referral portal
Fully branded, and no new account to create.
The portal carries Lebara's own branding, so taking part never feels like leaving Lebara. Behind it, single sign-on removes the registration step entirely: users log in with their Lebara credentials, and the program can validate in the moment whether someone qualifies for a given incentive.
That same integration lets Lebara and Aklamio share anonymized performance statistics, track user behavior and send targeted messages, so the program is optimized on evidence rather than on a one-size-fits-all guess.
Refer a Friend is one of the most important acquisition channels for us. Over the last 18 months or so, we have seen it grow from almost nothing to a significant chunk in our acquisition mix. Not only does the channel get us one of the best quality of customers, it also is a good way to reward existing customers. The new customers get an exclusive benefit, we get a new customer. Everybody wins. Thanks to the success of the program, underpinned by Aklamio's unique referral solution and their dedicated customer success team, we're looking forward to expanding the program to other countries.
How other enterprise teams run incentives with us.
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